If I Were a Poet

I hear the wind in branches,
the low and rising growls from bones
buried under the sun-soaked prairie.

I hear the footsteps of ghosts
chasing wild horses across the plain.
There a lone pine
marks where a bride was snatched by fever
from her young lover’s arms.

Oh, the weeping that winter
with the wind in the pine,
its needles falling to the earth
like snakeskins shed
and spirits
gone to higher places.